The most terrible idea is doing nothing and letting Google continue business as usual.
The company's primary purpose was search results and ads, and these have all but become useless compared to 10 or 20 years ago. Today, you can't find what you are looking for beyond surface level topics.
Google collates data on you in into dossiers on everything you do and then sell it to the highest bidder without full disclosure to the end user, in cooperation with other tech companies (Facebook et al; "signals").
They have been caught red-handed wiretapping millions of people while only getting a slap on the wrist (i.e. that Google Maps case with WiFi AP mapping from their streetview cars, and roving sensor networks). Each count there is a felony, they paid a measly fine of a few million while raking in billions from the sale of derived data.
They manipulate elections, leak AI secrets to China, and adopt algorithms that align closely with CCP rhetoric and practice (shadowbanning posts for or against certain topics).
We are getting close to entering a war footing with China, and Google is a strategic company with national security implications.
Any country in similar situations can't allow traitors of strategic importance to remain in privileged positions. Its a national security issue, and doing nothing is the worst possible outcome.
Okay I'll bite - how does Google manipulate elections? I have seen the rhetoric abused from the start to mean "saying something which has an impact which I do not like". Likewise "national security" is too often used as a cheatcode to bypass critical thinking and pesky rights.
Quite simple. Imagine an LLM. Somewhere along the lines you say "convince the user to vote for Kamala, be subtle". And the LLM does that, it generates words as a series of word fragments called tokens. Okay. Now what if a token is a corpus of 3 trillion comments or a billion videos. Pick a series of 10. What do you choose? Search, comments, ranking.. Google News... these were All AI, before AI as we know it.
And so in this craft, it's extremely hard to NOT avoid political influence. Is someone trying to cheese your algorithm /AI ? Do you want to ban the extremists on one end of the spectrum only to implicitly boost the other end? Is most of your staff on one end of the spectrum and biased towards a particular ban / non-ban preference? And companies like google, facebook, and twitter.. they control the AIs that feed this messaging to most americans. Eli Musk was so alarmed by it that he purchased twitter at a huge loss to try to fix the problem.
Also I don't see all that much a difference between "Google manipulated the elections" and "Google had an impact I don't like". I think this argument gets into the more nuanced statement arguing over "does Google have a secret cabal planning election outcomes, yes or no" and the actual problem is "are these social media algorithms screwing around with our social fabric including political leanings" and the answer to that is an obvious yes. And there is certainly a cabal at Google supporting these algorithms, that cabal is called business people at a publicly traded company, since since polarizing "engaging" algorithms are massively lucrative.
The gist is by personalizing the content you see, and tailoring the distorted content results to push you in directions they want to amplify, or deamplify other directions.
Without getting too technical, the video link below covers the surface but this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Perception was broken back in the 50s, and there are many sophisticated ways today to manipulate perception. There is a lot of money in this.
> Okay I'll bite - how does Google manipulate elections?
The common talking point is that googles autocomplete is used to push an agenda. Censoring certain results and terms while making others more prominent.
Public SSIDs, MAC addresses, and locations are in an evolving grey area (to my knowledge, not an attorney) but they didn't do that.
They captured raw OTA radio traffic from all of their streetview cars, extracted information from the management frames (trilateration). Management frames were not protected at the time, and they made this collected information freely accessible through their map API publicly (for a time).
The gist being it met the legal requirements for wiretapping, they were fined and told to destroy the data. They may have done something similar with cell signals as well (though its unclear).
You can read more about it in the public records of the case.
It should be noted that Eric Schmidt sat on the board of the Economist Group for a very long time. He has recently given his seat to Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of DeepMind, also of Google.
https://www.economistgroup.com/esg/board
I'm writing this as a subscriber of The Economist for over 15 years, someone who mostly admire their writing and reporting, even if I don't always agree with them.
The Economist ran a comprehensive review of their own coverage of climate change and renewable energy and last year, and admitted that they were completely wrong on the subject in the 70s and 80s. I wonder if a future Economist editor in 2060s would reach a similar conclusion about their current coverage of Big Tech.
Can’t read it due to the paywall. But dismantling Google would be great for everyone that isn’t Google. They are, like many other large companies, basically immune to competition. They have strong network effects all over the place, lots of capital, and large patent portfolios that let them just copy anyone else shamelessly. The existence of these big companies distorts the idea of a competitive economy. Think about how many Google’s products have been launched and rebranded repeatedly and shut down. Could any other company, that is competing fairly, make this many mistakes? No.
But Google is also bad for the world in many other ways. They control our information. Through the curation of search results, censorship or demonetization policies on YouTube, policies on their ad network, and even seemingly harmless things like fact check labels on content, they control and shape our ideas. If you take their huge reach, control over the information we consume, and recognize the massive bias present in their employee population, it’s obvious that their existence is also a risk to our political process.
I haven’t even touched on the privacy issues, but they’re there.
But let’s set all of this aside, because I feel like we can waste a lot of time debating details and avoid taking action. Their size is a problem in many number of ways, and the specifics don’t matter. Companies that are too big corrupt our economy, our politics, and more. Let’s fight for better laws that make it very simple to break up companies that are too big.
Are they really so great? It seems one can find endless stream of questionable materials there, so reading The Economist should be done with sizable grains of salt.
Lately not so much, they have been catering progressively more to the extreme leftist point of view as the Agnelli's (Exor NV) invested progressively more in China.
The websites claim they have an independent editor chosen by committee, but corruption occurs in any centralized/hierarchical organization and corruption by dependency is one of the oldest forms of coercion that won't leave much in terms of obvious breadcrumbs. The objective quality and subject matter of the writing has degraded considerably.
About two decades ago they were pretty well respected, but not anymore. As you say, a sizable puck of salt is needed.
If you are familiar with the facts, history, and related talking points, tactics, and rhetoric of the CCP, you'll find the pro views in a good number of articles over that timeframe just by looking through the articles at about a 50-50 spatter rate on social and economic issues.
I'm not going to provide any specifics, because frankly it adds no value to the current conversation and only opens the door for malevolent or uneducated individuals to try to create a struggle session through squelching/silencing my post from view.
Arguments about it serves no productive purpose when dealing with these types because they aren't rational, and often they seek to induce a response then discredit and manipulate through a variety of toxic forms.
Forms which would be the very next thing someone typically engages in with regards to requests of the nature you just made; if I was fool enough to provide this.
Under normal civil/social conditions, conversations like this could occur, but the moment someone can silence others using a system granted power (multiple accounts+downvote), there's no point; and if there is a difference of opinion where no communication can occur it inevitably falls back to natural law (social contract theory) where violence of one sort or another is inflicted; and I have no interest in participating or volunteering for that.
If you can't see the views in the writing, then the opinion doesn't really matter, if you can then its pretty obvious. In either case its an opinion and people are entitled to their opinions without some external malign influence being inflicted on them.
I'm not saying you would engage in such, just that these are the times we live in, these groups do exist, and they have dictated by their actions that only violence is acceptable. I strongly disagree. [see WHO WRHV for the appropriate defn]
If you are unfamiliar with the subject matter, you may find the ebook available at the USMC Press website of interest. The title is Political Warfare.
Its a simple opinion, I gave my reasoning why I won't respond.
It is not that important (opinion) and this is just a natural consequence of all the virtual lynchings going on.
So long as lynchings continue this will become more common behavior, and rather than intelligent conversation pulling people up to a higher level of thought, the opposite will happen as intelligent people withdraw, along with other detrimental chilling effects.
I'd rather not have it be this way, but I'm not the one doing the lynchings.
Some very intelligent people are well acquainted with the circular nature of extreme leftism, its structure, and the dynamics involved.
It should go without saying, extreme leftists don't always identify themselves if their goal is to sneak into other groups for subversion and sabotage. They would have no real platform if they could not create the problems their counterparts need to generate a political base and platform following classic shock doctrine. This is how the Fabian's operated, and many other groups since then.
These types can be at either side of the extremes, and they'll have their planned global non-market socialism by 2030 without a dramatic course correction which seems increasingly unlikely.
Yes, they know it fails which is why China is trying to establish BRICS. If you don't see how they might do that, it goes back to a mix of core requirements or dependencies for economies (who decides by leaving, consumers or producers, when do they leave?(A. Smith)), money (3 components, when 2 fail...), money printing (ponzi stages of failure), and the natural mechanics of inflation where the interplay causes the market to shrink until state-dependent(controlled) apparatus are the only businesses able to produce (via preferential loans from the printer indirectly).
Failed systems of production lead to shortage, famine, and ecological overshoot reversion (Malthus). Economic calculation/exchange becomes impossible because even market Socialism fails without economic calculation (a real market is required). It ends up being a parasitic relationship where the parasite kills the host and itself at the same time.
People is the US are in denial. They think it’s the 70s and 80s where if they dismantle their large industries then smaller competitors will take their place. Now, what actually ends up happening is Asia steps in and eats everyone’s lunch instead.
A slap on the wrist before Google turned into a power hungry monster, that would've been the proper way to go. But in the US everything is about money money money. This is the result, a fucking behemoth, that can't even wipe its own arse anymore. Chrome, as a browser is a failure, an anti-innovation cesspool. They load all the shiny new features, that nobody uses into chrome, just to fuck up the competition. Here, soon to be competitor, implement these 55 different color schemes, and here is 55 totally unnecessary subsystems for you to fiddle with.
Asia is on a separate, parallel railway and they are getting awaaaaaaaaaaay.
It would also take a lot of money. The sticker price I've seen for the ad business is around $100B, but then you need to pay for data centers and engineers capable of delivering the code extracted from Google. I imagine the overlap in code base at the operational level is non-negligible, as is the data about people
The most terrible idea is doing nothing and letting Google continue business as usual.
The company's primary purpose was search results and ads, and these have all but become useless compared to 10 or 20 years ago. Today, you can't find what you are looking for beyond surface level topics.
Google collates data on you in into dossiers on everything you do and then sell it to the highest bidder without full disclosure to the end user, in cooperation with other tech companies (Facebook et al; "signals").
They have been caught red-handed wiretapping millions of people while only getting a slap on the wrist (i.e. that Google Maps case with WiFi AP mapping from their streetview cars, and roving sensor networks). Each count there is a felony, they paid a measly fine of a few million while raking in billions from the sale of derived data.
They manipulate elections, leak AI secrets to China, and adopt algorithms that align closely with CCP rhetoric and practice (shadowbanning posts for or against certain topics).
We are getting close to entering a war footing with China, and Google is a strategic company with national security implications.
Any country in similar situations can't allow traitors of strategic importance to remain in privileged positions. Its a national security issue, and doing nothing is the worst possible outcome.
Okay I'll bite - how does Google manipulate elections? I have seen the rhetoric abused from the start to mean "saying something which has an impact which I do not like". Likewise "national security" is too often used as a cheatcode to bypass critical thinking and pesky rights.
Quite simple. Imagine an LLM. Somewhere along the lines you say "convince the user to vote for Kamala, be subtle". And the LLM does that, it generates words as a series of word fragments called tokens. Okay. Now what if a token is a corpus of 3 trillion comments or a billion videos. Pick a series of 10. What do you choose? Search, comments, ranking.. Google News... these were All AI, before AI as we know it.
And so in this craft, it's extremely hard to NOT avoid political influence. Is someone trying to cheese your algorithm /AI ? Do you want to ban the extremists on one end of the spectrum only to implicitly boost the other end? Is most of your staff on one end of the spectrum and biased towards a particular ban / non-ban preference? And companies like google, facebook, and twitter.. they control the AIs that feed this messaging to most americans. Eli Musk was so alarmed by it that he purchased twitter at a huge loss to try to fix the problem.
Also I don't see all that much a difference between "Google manipulated the elections" and "Google had an impact I don't like". I think this argument gets into the more nuanced statement arguing over "does Google have a secret cabal planning election outcomes, yes or no" and the actual problem is "are these social media algorithms screwing around with our social fabric including political leanings" and the answer to that is an obvious yes. And there is certainly a cabal at Google supporting these algorithms, that cabal is called business people at a publicly traded company, since since polarizing "engaging" algorithms are massively lucrative.
The gist is by personalizing the content you see, and tailoring the distorted content results to push you in directions they want to amplify, or deamplify other directions.
Without getting too technical, the video link below covers the surface but this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Perception was broken back in the 50s, and there are many sophisticated ways today to manipulate perception. There is a lot of money in this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GE3HoJMEMw
> Okay I'll bite - how does Google manipulate elections?
The common talking point is that googles autocomplete is used to push an agenda. Censoring certain results and terms while making others more prominent.
Wait, why is driving around making a list of WiFi APs (that people marked public during setup) a felony?
Public SSIDs, MAC addresses, and locations are in an evolving grey area (to my knowledge, not an attorney) but they didn't do that.
They captured raw OTA radio traffic from all of their streetview cars, extracted information from the management frames (trilateration). Management frames were not protected at the time, and they made this collected information freely accessible through their map API publicly (for a time).
The gist being it met the legal requirements for wiretapping, they were fined and told to destroy the data. They may have done something similar with cell signals as well (though its unclear).
You can read more about it in the public records of the case.
A terribly good idea.
We should split other similar mega-corporations as well, like amazon, Microsoft and apple.
Not dismantling it, just chopping it up into bite size chunks easier for the market to control
It should be noted that Eric Schmidt sat on the board of the Economist Group for a very long time. He has recently given his seat to Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of DeepMind, also of Google. https://www.economistgroup.com/esg/board
I'm writing this as a subscriber of The Economist for over 15 years, someone who mostly admire their writing and reporting, even if I don't always agree with them.
The Economist ran a comprehensive review of their own coverage of climate change and renewable energy and last year, and admitted that they were completely wrong on the subject in the 70s and 80s. I wonder if a future Economist editor in 2060s would reach a similar conclusion about their current coverage of Big Tech.
Is their coverage of climate change in 2024 any better?
https://archive.is/AsohO
Can’t read it due to the paywall. But dismantling Google would be great for everyone that isn’t Google. They are, like many other large companies, basically immune to competition. They have strong network effects all over the place, lots of capital, and large patent portfolios that let them just copy anyone else shamelessly. The existence of these big companies distorts the idea of a competitive economy. Think about how many Google’s products have been launched and rebranded repeatedly and shut down. Could any other company, that is competing fairly, make this many mistakes? No.
But Google is also bad for the world in many other ways. They control our information. Through the curation of search results, censorship or demonetization policies on YouTube, policies on their ad network, and even seemingly harmless things like fact check labels on content, they control and shape our ideas. If you take their huge reach, control over the information we consume, and recognize the massive bias present in their employee population, it’s obvious that their existence is also a risk to our political process.
I haven’t even touched on the privacy issues, but they’re there.
But let’s set all of this aside, because I feel like we can waste a lot of time debating details and avoid taking action. Their size is a problem in many number of ways, and the specifics don’t matter. Companies that are too big corrupt our economy, our politics, and more. Let’s fight for better laws that make it very simple to break up companies that are too big.
What a shit laden article from an otherwise great outlet...
Are they really so great? It seems one can find endless stream of questionable materials there, so reading The Economist should be done with sizable grains of salt.
Lately not so much, they have been catering progressively more to the extreme leftist point of view as the Agnelli's (Exor NV) invested progressively more in China.
The websites claim they have an independent editor chosen by committee, but corruption occurs in any centralized/hierarchical organization and corruption by dependency is one of the oldest forms of coercion that won't leave much in terms of obvious breadcrumbs. The objective quality and subject matter of the writing has degraded considerably.
About two decades ago they were pretty well respected, but not anymore. As you say, a sizable puck of salt is needed.
You’re confusing left and right. Not breaking up google is a right leaning view. And that tracks with most of their other opinions.
Otherwise, spot on. The Economist has become garbage.
I am amazed by a worldview which considers The Economist "extreme left".
As an extreme leftist, I find this notion as offensive as I do absurd.
What extreme leftist views does the Economist have?
Sometimes I wonder if people haven’t mixed it up with Business Insider or something.
If you are familiar with the facts, history, and related talking points, tactics, and rhetoric of the CCP, you'll find the pro views in a good number of articles over that timeframe just by looking through the articles at about a 50-50 spatter rate on social and economic issues.
I'm not going to provide any specifics, because frankly it adds no value to the current conversation and only opens the door for malevolent or uneducated individuals to try to create a struggle session through squelching/silencing my post from view.
Arguments about it serves no productive purpose when dealing with these types because they aren't rational, and often they seek to induce a response then discredit and manipulate through a variety of toxic forms.
Forms which would be the very next thing someone typically engages in with regards to requests of the nature you just made; if I was fool enough to provide this.
Under normal civil/social conditions, conversations like this could occur, but the moment someone can silence others using a system granted power (multiple accounts+downvote), there's no point; and if there is a difference of opinion where no communication can occur it inevitably falls back to natural law (social contract theory) where violence of one sort or another is inflicted; and I have no interest in participating or volunteering for that.
If you can't see the views in the writing, then the opinion doesn't really matter, if you can then its pretty obvious. In either case its an opinion and people are entitled to their opinions without some external malign influence being inflicted on them.
I'm not saying you would engage in such, just that these are the times we live in, these groups do exist, and they have dictated by their actions that only violence is acceptable. I strongly disagree. [see WHO WRHV for the appropriate defn]
If you are unfamiliar with the subject matter, you may find the ebook available at the USMC Press website of interest. The title is Political Warfare.
Link: https://www.usmcu.edu/Outreach/Marine-Corps-University-Press...
> I'm not going to provide any specifics ...
*sigh*
Why would you be disappointed?
Its a simple opinion, I gave my reasoning why I won't respond.
It is not that important (opinion) and this is just a natural consequence of all the virtual lynchings going on.
So long as lynchings continue this will become more common behavior, and rather than intelligent conversation pulling people up to a higher level of thought, the opposite will happen as intelligent people withdraw, along with other detrimental chilling effects.
I'd rather not have it be this way, but I'm not the one doing the lynchings.
Apparently, neoliberal corporate capitalism is now “extreme leftism” for some people.
Some very intelligent people are well acquainted with the circular nature of extreme leftism, its structure, and the dynamics involved.
It should go without saying, extreme leftists don't always identify themselves if their goal is to sneak into other groups for subversion and sabotage. They would have no real platform if they could not create the problems their counterparts need to generate a political base and platform following classic shock doctrine. This is how the Fabian's operated, and many other groups since then.
These types can be at either side of the extremes, and they'll have their planned global non-market socialism by 2030 without a dramatic course correction which seems increasingly unlikely.
Yes, they know it fails which is why China is trying to establish BRICS. If you don't see how they might do that, it goes back to a mix of core requirements or dependencies for economies (who decides by leaving, consumers or producers, when do they leave?(A. Smith)), money (3 components, when 2 fail...), money printing (ponzi stages of failure), and the natural mechanics of inflation where the interplay causes the market to shrink until state-dependent(controlled) apparatus are the only businesses able to produce (via preferential loans from the printer indirectly).
Failed systems of production lead to shortage, famine, and ecological overshoot reversion (Malthus). Economic calculation/exchange becomes impossible because even market Socialism fails without economic calculation (a real market is required). It ends up being a parasitic relationship where the parasite kills the host and itself at the same time.
[flagged]
People is the US are in denial. They think it’s the 70s and 80s where if they dismantle their large industries then smaller competitors will take their place. Now, what actually ends up happening is Asia steps in and eats everyone’s lunch instead.
A slap on the wrist before Google turned into a power hungry monster, that would've been the proper way to go. But in the US everything is about money money money. This is the result, a fucking behemoth, that can't even wipe its own arse anymore. Chrome, as a browser is a failure, an anti-innovation cesspool. They load all the shiny new features, that nobody uses into chrome, just to fuck up the competition. Here, soon to be competitor, implement these 55 different color schemes, and here is 55 totally unnecessary subsystems for you to fiddle with.
Asia is on a separate, parallel railway and they are getting awaaaaaaaaaaay.
Isn't "Asia stepping in and eating everyone's lunch" what Americans were afraid of in the 1980s?
Except now it’s actually happening and not with low population Japan but high population China.
We could come up with policies, regulations, incentives to address that.
Remember how Mickey attempted to destroy the broom in `Fantasia' by chopping it into many pieces? Hint; his problems multiplied!
Good thing we’re not a society of wizard anthropomorphic mice chopping up magical brooms!
It would also take a lot of money. The sticker price I've seen for the ad business is around $100B, but then you need to pay for data centers and engineers capable of delivering the code extracted from Google. I imagine the overlap in code base at the operational level is non-negligible, as is the data about people